Anything sounds weighty when uttered by the President of the United States, which is why a new internet text-to-speech app called "Talk Obama to Me" is such fun. All you have to do is input whatever text you want to make the President himself read it back. According to developer and Stanford Linguistics PhD candidate Ed King, the program is a "video speech synthesizer that automatically chops up video of Barack Obama and puts it in order, so that he says whatever you want him to."

No one knows for certain what will happen if an errant drone crashes into a passenger jet. Who wants to find out for sure? Better to keep drones and planes well out of each other's way. One important step is for Congress to pass the Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill that's working its way through the Senate this month. Among many other things, the bill adopts some of the strictest regulations for commercial and hobby drones yet. It's way past time to start getting a handle on these flying robots.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display

Anticipating whether the car in front is going to take the next left or is slowing down is a fundamental part of driving, and key to not totalling your car. While keeping your eyes ahead should be second nature to those on the road, this most basic of tasks is still a challenge for driverless cars. But details have emerged of a patent filed by Google for its autonomous vehicles to detect and track brake and indicator lights of other cars on the road. Google has filed a patent for its autonomous vehicles to detect and track brake and indicator lights of other cars on the road. This will enable the driverless cars to better anticipate the movements of cars on the road. The technology would enable the driverless cars to anticipate the movements of cars on the road ahead using a forward-facing camera.

The world's militaries are close enough to wielding weapons that decide on their own whether to kill -- called Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems -- that the United Nations this week gathered a select few experts, including an ASU researcher, to separate fact from fear of robot overlords. Dr. Heather Roff, research scientist with ASU's Global Security Initiative and current Oxford senior research fellow, is testifying on the unintended risks of such weapons, and where many autonomous or semi-autonomous weapons currently exist. Her research focuses on artificial intelligence and human control. Dr. Heather Roff, researcher at ASU's Global Security Initiative, testifies at a UN meeting of experts to consider lethal autonomous weapons. Dr. Roff's testimony focuses on unintentional risks of autonomous weapons systems, including artificial intelligence and human control.

Your math teacher lied to you. Sometimes getting your sums wrong is a good thing. So says Joseph Bates, cofounder and CEO of Singular Computing, a company whose computer chips are hardwired to be incapable of performing mathematical calculations correctly. Ask it to add 1 and 1 and you will get answers like 2.01 or 1.98. Pentagon research agency DARPA funded the creation of Singular's chip because that fuzziness can be an asset when it comes to some of the hardest problems for computers, such as making sense of video or other messy real world data. "Just because the hardware is sucky doesn't mean the software's result has to be," says Bates.

In addition to accessing cutting edge data analytics tools, and allowing them to scale at speed, companies are looking to platform-as-a-service providers Google, Microsoft and Amazon to remove trade barriers in complex markets like China. Last week, Xero announced a strategic push into Asia with the opening of its new regional headquarters in Singapore. But it will bide its time on China until big platform-as-a-service providers pave the way. "As it works at the moment, we would have to give Chinese authorities access to our source code and host our data in China. I don't know that we'd feel very comfortable with that," Mr Drury told The Australian Financial Review at Xerocon last year when asked about the impact of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a major trade deal involving Australia and 11 other countries.

"Advanced cyberlearning environments that involve Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence innovations are becoming powerful tools that can facilitate the explorations and conversations needed to solve society's "wicked challenges," said Winslow Burleson, PhD, MSE, an engineer by training and currently associate professor, New York University Rory Meyers College of Nursing. The researchers posit that the use of technology, specifically a bundled and ever-evolving fluid set of integrated cyber tools, will connect disparate groups and individuals, converging them in both a real and an imagined cyber-social-physical environment, called the Holodeck, that Burleson's NYU-X Lab is currently advancing in prototype form, in close collaboration with colleagues at NYU Courant, Tandon, Steinhardt, and Tisch, "The "Holodeck" will support a broad range of transdisciplinary collaborations, integrated education, research, and innovation by providing a networked software/hardware infrastructure that can synthesize visual, audio, physical, social, and societal components," said Burleson. NYU-X Lab's Holodeck prototype harnesses the collective power of shared computation, integrated distributed data, immersive visualization, and social interaction to make possible large-scale synthesis of learning, research, and innovation, that will dramatically accelerate the Rittel and Webber iterative mode of problem solving. The goal is to create a networked infrastructure and communication environment where "wicked challenges" can be iteratively explored and re-solved, utilizing visual, acoustic, and physical sensory feedback, human dynamics with and social collaboration.

In the late 1960s, urban planners Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber began formulating the concept of "wicked problems" or "wicked challenges" --problems so vexing in the realm of social and organizational planning that they could not be successfully ameliorated with traditional linear, analytical, systems-engineering types of approaches. These "wicked challenges" are poorly defined, abstruse, and connected to strong moral, political and professional issues. Some examples might include: "How should we deal with crime and violence in our schools? "How should we wage the'War on Terror'? or "What is good national immigration policy?" "Wicked problems," by their very nature, are strongly stakeholder dependent; there is often little consensus even about what the problem is, let alone how to deal with it.

The question of robotic ethics is making everyone tense. We worry about the machine's lack of empathy, how calculating machines are going to know how to do the right thing, and even how we are going to judge and punish beings of steel and silicon. I am less concerned about robots doing wrong, and far more concerned about the moment they look at us and are appalled at how often we fail to do right. I am convinced that they will not only be smarter than we are, but have truer moral compasses, as well. Let's be clear about what is and is not at issue here.